Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM) (8 page)

For a couple of weeks, Rex took it easy on me. I was wearing the damned footies, so the anticipation was something—I
still
never knew what I was going to see when I opened the door to our room. Sometimes, it was Rex beating off, in which case I could usually come back later. But still, I lived on a sort of sexual edge, not sure what Rex was going to do next.

In a way, it was the perfect distraction, because as much as I’d known I wasn’t ready for college, tanking hard and spinning out in flames was not as easy as it sounds. For one thing, I couldn’t tank. I was
at college
. If nothing else, Oliver had shown me that not everybody
had
the opportunities I did. Yeah, maybe I would fail, but that didn’t mean I was going to give up.

Unfortunately.

Because that meant I was grinding away every day, working my ass off on papers, on assignments, using my Kindle dictionary until my battery died,
praying
that at some point some of this shit would all get easier. It didn’t. I’d go to the library and text Oliver for help, hoping his patience would sustain us both, but even Oliver had limits.

Oliver, you got a sec?

Sorry, Rusty, man, I really don’t.

What’s doing?

Fighting with my dad.

Really? Oliver’s dad was the nicest person on the planet. And he obviously
adored
his tiny gay son. I couldn’t imagine them fighting about
anything
.

About what?

I don’t want to talk about it.

Okay. Sorry. Tag me later.

Love you.

What?

Oh shit. Forget I said it. Slipped out. Gottagobye.

And I was left, trying to struggle through my history paper on my own.

Rex really
was
taking it easy on me. All I had to worry about was walking by a sex-mussed person—male or female—coming out of his room right when I was due back, or, more often, walking in on him when he was waxing his own knob. When that happened, he wasn’t even awful or crude about it. Just smiled at me and asked me if I wanted to join in. The horrible part was that the answer was starting to be
Yes! Yes I want to join in! I’m lonely, and I miss my best friend, and I’m starting to realize this
isn’t
going away, and I just want to be touched.
But it would have been all wrong—even I knew that. Rex was like . . . like a bastion of raging sexuality, all on his own. I was clingy and needy and . . .

And I didn’t want to be alone. In the past, I’d had sex just to get my knob polished, and I don’t know how Rex and all these other people could do that all the time. Now, when I thought about having stupid nameless sex, I thought about Oliver, and about confessing to him because I told him
everything
, and well, I couldn’t.

But I did start waking up more and more often, early in the morning when Rex was fast asleep, thinking about Oliver.

It started to be my favorite thing. Sometimes, the only thing that got me out of bed was the fact that my cum got clammy and sticky when I stayed curled under the sheets too long.

But not even
that
could take away my pathological dread of History 101. I didn’t understand it. I mean, I could memorize the dates, but I absolutely did
not
get things like how they could know Franklin Pierce was a bad president because all of the literature about him said he was a good one.

So I plodded through, and Oliver tried to help me, but he had his own life and his own family and I figured I’d stop asking.

Rusty?

Yeah?

Haven’t heard from you for a day—what’s wrong?

Nothing. Didn’t want to bother you.

The radio silence is bothering me. What’s up?

The question made my eyes burn, and I started to tear up in the damned library.

Nothing. Same old bullshit.

Rex giving you any more grief?

No. He’s been good about getting off without me.

Ha ha ha!

Wait—that’s not the way I meant it!

I know—I’m sorry. What else is going on?

I’m stupid and I shouldn’t be here.

Please stop saying that.

Why not? You know it, I know it, the professors know it.

Well, maybe you can ask your parents to change schools at the end of the semester.

But first I’ll get myself kicked out of Berkeley so I can hear them telling me I’m a failure.

I can hardly wait.

You’re not a failure, Rusty.

You could have fooled me.

You’re in over your head—it happens to everyone.

Not you. You know exactly who you are and exactly what you want from life.

I’m like a big sea creature, and no place is the sea.

There was a big long pause then, and I surreptitiously wiped my eyes before going back to my homework. After a few minutes, I looked at the phone, but Oliver had apparently lost patience with me, because he hadn’t answered.

I’m sorry.

You should be. You’re breaking my heart there. Come home.

You mean for Thanksgiving?

I mean for me.

I’ll try to come home at Thanksgiving.

That’ll be a start.

But the conversations and the steadily building certainty that I was
never
going to want to bring a girl back to my dorm room or home to my parents weren’t enough. I was still lost, and Professor Pritchard seemed to hate me with a vengeance.

I actually made an appointment to see him. We’d just gotten our second papers back. My first one had gotten a resounding C, so I’d talked to Oliver and he’d helped me with my thesis and everything for the second paper. I got the paper back, and it said,
I don’t know whose work this is, but it’s not yours! F.

I knocked on his door, a plain wooden door in a plain white corridor, and when he boomed, “Come in!” I went through.

He was what? Fifty? Early sixties? But he liked to wear Hawaiian shirts and jeans, and his long, curly, thinning hair was gray and bushy at his shoulders. He might have been a redhead when he was younger, because he had the sort of skin that once went with freckles, and he
looked
like one of the übercool teachers you’d see in an after-school special.

So far though, he’d been nothing but a rank bastard who liked to scream at all of us about how useless it was to be rich when we couldn’t think for ourselves. He loved the scholarship kids—praised them to the skies—and I was pretty sure he’d enjoy the hell out of Rex, because Rex just smiled at people and admitted he was a spoiled horndog, and people ate that shit up.

But me? I was a spoiled rich boy. I mean, I was, but I wasn’t. I was starting to realize that I would rather have grown up with Oliver’s family than mine, even if that meant no car and no letterman’s jacket and no motherfucking Berkeley.

“Professor?”

“Mr. Baker?”

“I, uh, this
is
my work.” I held out the paper with the big fat F in stark red pen. I hated that. Even the color was incriminating. “I . . . my friend helped me with my thesis, but . . . I mean, I’m not a cheater. I cited all my sources and everything.”

The professor gave me a hard look from top to bottom. “Baker, you can’t even put two sentences together and make sense. How in the hell am I supposed to believe you came up with the idea that Nathaniel Hawthorne was the reason Franklin Pierce got elected?”

I swallowed. “You only said it about six thousand times. I’m not stupid. I mean, I
am
stupid, but I’m trying. I listened. I took notes. My friend, the one who helped me with the research, he sent me all these books to look up. I
worked
for this, professor! I mean, it’s not genius stuff, I get that, but I earned more than an F.”

“You haven’t earned anything in your life,” he sneered. “There are kids all over the country
killing
themselves to get here, and I have
you
in my class? Jesus, kid, did you think your daddy’s money was going to buy your grade as well as your ticket in?”

And suddenly all this misery I’d been tamping down on exploded out of me. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t
know
it’s unfair? Oliver should be here! He’s hella fucking smart, and if I could have sent him here in my place, I would have. I didn’t want to be here—I
saw
it coming. It was gonna be a clusterfuck from beginning to end, but I had to, right? Just like I had to play football, and I have to be straight? And I hate it!
I hate it
! I miss Oliver so fucking bad, and I don’t give a fuck about my dad and his money, but
I want to go home
!”

I stopped, breathing hard, and realized what I’d said, all of it, and I swallowed. I didn’t know what to say, or how to salvage this. I wasn’t straight, and I wasn’t cut out for Berkeley, and Oliver was my home.

And I’d just screamed all that in my professor’s face.

I couldn’t look at him. I held up the paper, curling the edges in sweaty fingers. “I’m sorry, professor,” I mumbled. “I deserve a better grade.” And then I let the paper float to the ground and turned around and walked back to my dorm.

Rex was in there, fucking a boy this time. A slightly built, dark-haired Hispanic boy, and for a moment my heart jumped with joy, because I didn’t give a damn
what
Rex was doing, I thought it was Oliver.

It wasn’t. His face was wider and his chin was more square, and his nose was flatter. I didn’t see his eyes. I walked to my bed and crawled in without even taking off my shoes. I listened to their sex noises and felt a disturbing mixture of despair and arousal, and I hadn’t even sorted out which was which before I went to sleep.

I went to bed on Friday, and I must have gotten up sometime to go pee and take off my shoes and my jeans. I don’t remember when, but I must have, because I wasn’t wearing them when I heard Oliver’s voice shrieking in a tinny echo over a computer speaker. The phone by my pillow said Monday, November 3, which meant I’d gone to sleep on Halloween and missed it.